by brettb on July 30, 2010
As reported by the San Jose Mercury News, Toyota is recalling 412,000 Avalons and Lexuses due to personal injury and product liability concerns that could result from steering problems.
The Avalons that will be impacted date from between 2000 and 2004. The cars have improperly cast steering lock bars that appear to have been a factor in three personal injury accidents reported to the company.
The product defect could potentially cause a crack to develop on the surface of the steering wheel, which in turn may increase the risk of a collision or accident.
In other Toyota Recall related news, Bloomberg News reported that Toyota is set to recall 80,000 Land Cruisers for another problem involving steering shafts.
When these recent recalls are taken into account, the total of recalled Toyotas world wide for the past year is approximately 9 million vehicles. And Toyota continues to face hundred of personal injury and product liability lawsuits for related injuries and product defects.
by brettb on July 29, 2010
If you are involved in a serious personal injury accident involving a car or SUV, your vehicle’s “black box” contains useful information that can assist your personal injury attorney and accident reconstruction expert in a personal injury lawsuit.
A black box is actually an event data recording device. It records data regarding your vehicle’s speed, direction, braking and other information. For years in personal injury and product liability lawsuits Toyota has argued that event data recorders were unreliable. This of course was because the data that they collected was normally not very helpful for Toyota.
However, now according to the Los Angeles Times, Toyota seems to have done an about-face. The company is citing data from these devices in order to argue that driver error, and not product defects, are to blame for the sudden acceleration issues in some of its vehicles.
As quoted by the Times, according to Henry Jasney, senior counsel at Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, “It sounds duplicitous when all along Toyota has been saying this is unreliable, and now they are using it as their defense and they are not releasing the data to the public.”
